Why we were down for 4 days.

It was Thursday of last week when the biggest scare we’ve ever had happened. It couldn’t have waited till Halloween, too.

In short, the site went offline and not due to a small technical issue either! The whole site literally disappeared and not like a grim grinning ghost would disappear. The site ceased to exist with every file being deleted from existence. We weren’t grinning at all when we saw 8+ years of our work disappear before our very eyes, but seeing a blank site very much scared us into a ghost-like state.

It all came about when we were in the process of migrating over our site to a new server. In non-tech terms, we were moving all our files from one place to another. It wasn’t until the last day of move that we noticed that our transfer corrupted and in effect started to delete itself.

It was inevitable, really. Tech issues happen but thankfully, we invested in a service that backs up our entire site and we’re relieved that we didn’t lose a thing. But that was only half the challenge. The other part of the challenge was putting back everything in the exact way it was before.

For those familiar with websites, you would know that re-uploading an entire website involves coding knowledge and a heaping load of patience and hard work. Together with our web team, we were able to get back up online just yesterday. Total amount of downtime was about 96 hours or 4 days.

I, personally, was scared to not only losing our decade’s worth of work, but to have failed all of you – our readers who have looked to DisneyExaminer as their means of daily Disney news. I was scared that you’d leave us for another site and never come back, but I was happily proven wrong.

Instead, many of you rallied around us sharing your support over social media and kind notes. You were all patient with us and that meant the world to us, especially myself that worked through what seemed like endless nights and days to get back online. In the end, it reminded me of why we do what we do. It’s become a cliche, but this dark time in our history made it less cliche and more meaningful.

DisneyExaminer is a magazine that’s by Disney fans (for the most part), for Disney fans (and more). We work everyday knowing that we’re spreading the magic to many people around the world. And although we do so, we’re even happier to know that those people would stand behind us, too.

What a magical audience you all are! It’s such an honor to serve every single one of you. Please know that we’re extremely grateful for your kindness and patience during our downtime. We learned a lot and hope to better serve you all with a seamless DisneyExaminer experience should we encounter downtime, like telling more stories and reporting via social media.

You can be happy to know that we have successfully transferred over our site to our new servers (which means less downtime overall). All our content is also back in its place, so you can revisit some of your past favorite DisneyExaminer stories.

We’ve also begun the process of working on an all-new site redesign so that you can experience our stories in a better, more visual and resourceful way.

DisneyExaminer 3.0 and a new downtime strategy are just a few ways of saying thank you to all of you, our DisneyExaminers for your love and support. We can’t wait to share even more stories and magic with you into the future. Let’s get through Halloween without any tech issues first.